


Salvation

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fictional Religion & Theology, Mothers and Children, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 19:26:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14119272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: He paces the front of the small room with slow, measured steps. His growing flock has use of it twice a week in the off-hours of the middle of the afternoon—it’s all the new regime will afford him. He accepts this fact graciously, glad for a place at all.





	Salvation

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** The idea of Marcus picking up where his mother left off was mentioned by galfridian, and I couldn't get it out of my head so today I rewatched the Vera Kane scene from "Murphy's Law" and imagined a potential role-reversal between Marcus and Octavia. 
> 
> Takes place about 6 months after Praimfaya.

He remembers his mother’s tone of voice more so than her kind face, lined with the ghosts of endless calming smiles, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes. More than her hands, folded gently around one of his, or cupping his cheek. Her hair, a brush of soft greying brown under his chin as she wrapped her arms around him, pulling her close. 

Marcus Kane remembers his mother’s voice, steady and reassuring, even unto death. 

“This bunker is our salvation, but it is also our test. We will endure if we have faith. Faith that one day, not so long from now, our people will return to the ground. Faith that one day, generations from now, Earth can be an Eden healed from the pain of Praimfaya.” He paces the front of the small room with slow, measured steps. His growing flock has use of it twice a week in the off-hours of the middle of the afternoon — it’s all the new regime will afford him. He accepts this fact graciously, glad for a place at all. 

The rest of the time, the arborvitae sapling resides in his and Abby’s quarters. 

Octavia has more trouble remembering anything of her mother. Aurora and Bellamy were her whole world for sixteen years, and every day she spends as Commander of Wonkru she feels them fade from her more and more, their features slipping awake like smoke into a morning mist. 

For reasons she cannot name, she lingers in the doorway, watching the service. Marcus allows her a minute to observe unnoticed, and then— 

“Are you here to join us?” 

She freezes. 

“She’s here to see me, Marcus,” Abby lies smoothly from a table in the corner, wrapping bleached linen into tight rolls for bandages — she does not participate. Not when she no longer feels faith herself. But she believes in Marcus, and so she comes, for him. 

Trying her best to appear grateful and yet still in control, Octavia crosses the room to Abby. 

“He is particularly… inspired, today. He reminds me of his mother,” Abby says, clipping a roll closed with a tarnished scrap of metal before gesturing to a second empty chair. 

Octavia doesn’t sit, but quietly asks, “What was she like?” 

“A good woman, a gentle soul. She would be proud of who he’s become,” she answers, as if she’s said it many times before, perhaps into the ear of the man himself after he’s jolted awake, sweating and shaking in the night. (She has.) Abby’s lips fold into a wan grin. 

“Let us begin the offering,” Marcus says from the front of the room, his hands clasping the shoulders of a small boy in Skaikru clothing. 

There aren’t many grounders in the room — they have their suspicions. Less of Marcus than of other Arkers, but trust is a long ways away between the people of the sky and the people of the ground, no matter who rules them. And the Grounders, particularly, have good cause to be wary of a Skaikru man peddling new religion. Marcus has a flock of twenty on this day, closer to thirty on others. An undecided Niylah sits in the back row next to Miller and Jackson, fidgeting with her canteen.  _ From the Earth, we will grow— _

Until our final journey to the ground. 

_ From the ashes, we will—  _

That part is yet to be written. No one knows what humanity will do when it opens the doors to the bunker in some four and a half years’ time, and blink into the sun. In the ashes, humanity will return to the Earth. 

Abby begins another roll as Marcus collects water from the congregation into a tin cup. Even in this small cramped place, with poor and meager tools, there is ceremony. “He was the tender of the Eden Tree up on the Ark, when we were kids.”

“Did your parents take you to services?”

Octavia sweeps her cape away from her to avoid sitting on it; she descends into the chair next to Abby at the small table. 

“No.” Abby’s smile grows wry. “Not many people on Alpha Station went. And I spent more of my free time in the clinic, learning how to do whip stitches on cadavers than on Mecha Station.” 

Together, they watch Marcus and the boy — an orphan now, a word that is almost meaningless, as so few of them have families on this side of oblivion — collect drops and trickles of water from each person sitting in the tidy rows of chairs. Octavia’s hands itch to be occupied, and so she reaches for the pile of linen and begins to roll. 

“Are you alright, Octavia?” Abby asks, voice deceptively even. 

Marcus returns to the makeshift altar poised before the congregants with the cup held securely between his hands, and bows his head as if in prayer. “As the Earth will one day provide for us, so we provide for the Earth.”  

His body shaped into a posture of reverence and ritual, he pours the water into the metal bucket holding the newest evolution of the Eden Tree. 

Abby’s question makes Octavia’s head spin. A year ago, she was taken from the one room she’d ever known to another room and locked inside. A year ago, she went from knowing two people — her mother, her brother — to being interrogated by firm and grim-faced guards before being sentenced to prison for the crime existing. And then she fell to the Earth. 

Now here she is again, locked under the floor, but the leader of twelve hundred. Octavia Blake thinks it is possible she has never been okay a day in her life. 

“I’m…” 

Her brows furrow. 

“My father used to think it was a waste of water, too,” Abby says, allowing Octavia to avoid answering. She thinks she might fear this slip of a girl, a human sacrifice to circumstance. She might, but Abby Griffin no longer fears death, if for no reason that she no longer feels much of anything at all but a dull ache at the fact of her existence. But she lives, because Marcus has asked that of her. 

She’s trying her best at it. 

“Not to them, it isn’t,” Octavia murmurs. 

“No, it’s not.” 

The two women watch Marcus Kane lead his people in prayers of thanksgiving and deliverance. 

“What happened to his mother?” Octavia asks, slowly realizing how little she knows about him outside of the man who dispensed justice without mercy or aforethought, the man who fell to the Earth as changed as she, the man who carried her out of Arkadia because it was what Lincoln asked of him. 

The man who was ready to die, and has despite it all, found a reason to live. 

The man trying to inspire others to live. 

“She died in the Unity Day bombing, right before the Ark came to the ground. It was violent, she passed in his arms.” Abby’s voice betrays a hint of emotion, a suggestion of the maelstrom churning underneath the numbness she encases herself in like armor. “She was so close to coming to the ground — she asked him to bring the Eden Tree down for her.” 

“Did he?” 

Aurora’s face appears in her mind’s eye, unbidden. 

“Yes.” 

Octavia stares hard at the tree, its crooked limbs furling into green needles.“Is that—?”

“No. He didn’t have the time to retrieve it before the death wave. Marcus dug this one up from outside the city gates before the Conclave. He had hope you would win,” Abby explains, in a timbre that could be described as maternal. Octavia has heard her use it on Clarke many times before, and on Raven. But never to her. Abby’s hands still, and for a moment Octavia fears that Abby is going to reach for her.

She doesn’t. 

“Why are you here, Octavia?” 

_ Why are you here, Abby?  _ Octavia thinks.  _ Why is Kane here? Why are any of us still pretending that we’re slouching towards salvation?  _ It rankles her, but she believes that Kane might be a good man, after it all. That all the pain, the violence, the suffering — it made him good. Whereas all that she has been through has made her… something else entirely. 

Whatever she needs to be to keep everyone alive. 

“Some of the grounders on my council were… concerned. They didn’t understand what he was doing. And I… there are still things I don’t know about the Ark,” she says instead, thinking of Jaha in his prison cell down in the darkest, dampest subasement. “I’ll explain it to Gaia.” 

Abby nods. “Right.” 

The service appears to end after a recitation of the Traveller’s Blessing, first in English and then in Trigedasleng — or at least, people stand and start talking to each other, embracing and shaking hands. Octavia pushes herself to her feet. She doesn’t want to be seen lingering, she doesn’t want to be approached by Kane. 

She turns to leave. 

“I’ll see about getting him a bigger space,” she says. “More chairs. But no water. We can’t spare any water. The hydroponics already take up enough. If he wants this tree to live, it’s on him and the rest of… them.” 

A ghost of a smile appears on Abby’s face. 

“He’d appreciate that.” 

Octavia nods. 

_ In peace, may you leave this shore _ _ — _ but humanity left the ground soaked in blood, and anointed a child by the sword. 

Peace never stood a chance. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are appreciated, BUT ALL OCTAVIA HATE WILL BE SUMMARILY DELETED.


End file.
